Fourth Industrial Revolution: Evaluating the Engineering Education Challenge from the Perspective of Chemical Engineering

The fourth industrial revolution (IR4.0) pushes the automation of machineries which revolutionises the manufacturing industry through the integration of emerging technologies. As a result, the demand for chemical engineering graduates with the skills to utilise new technologies has been proliferating. To evaluate the current chemical engineering curriculum's sufficiency in preparing students for the current industry from the student's perspective, a questionnaire-based study was conducted. The questionnaire consisted of three main sections, each formulated to achieve different research objectives. The main research objectives were to determine the awareness of chemical engineering students on IR4.0, their opinions on the importance of IR4.0 and the potential benefits of obtaining more knowledge towards IR4.0 within the education curriculum. The targeted participants were current chemical engineering students from universities situated in Malaysia. Responses from 30 students were collected and analysed with RStudio. The results suggested that the participants were all aware of IR4.0 and considered it an integral part of chemical engineering. Additionally, the study revealed a lack of familiarity with programming and the need to incorporate more programming into the current curriculum.